"There!" exclaimed Mrs. Payson. "Take it away. I knew it. Don't you think for one minute I'm going to have any foreign baby screaming around this house, sick as I am. Not for a minute. I hope you're satisfied, Lottie. Running an orphan asylum in this house. Well, I've still got something to say." But strangely enough she had little to say, after that. She showed small interest in the newcomer and they kept the baby out of the sick room. The little world of her bedside interested the sick woman more. She fancied them all in league against her. She would call Lottie to her bedside and send the nurse out of the room on some pretext or other that deceived no one. "Lottie, come here. Listen. That woman has got to go. Why, she won't let me get up! I'm perfectly well." "But perhaps you haven't quite got your strength, mama. You know it takes a while." "I'll never get my strength back lying here. Was I ever a person to stay in bed?" "No, mama. You've always been wonderful." "A lot of thanks I've got for it, too. Now, Lottie, you see that I get another doctor. This man's a fool. He doesn't understand my case. Palavering young hand-holder, that's what he is." "Don't you think you'd better try him a little longer? He hasn't had time, really." "Time! I've been three mortal months in this bed. You're like all the rest of them. Glad if I died. Well, I'm not going to please you just yet. You'll see me up to-morrow, early." They had heard this threat so regularly and so often that they scarcely heeded it now; or, if they did, only to say, soothingly, "We'll see how you feel by to-morrow, shall we?" So that when, finally, she made good her threat the nurse came in early one morning from where she slept in the alcove just off the big front bedroom to find her half-lying, half-sitting in the big chair by the window. She had got up stealthily, had even fumbled about in bureau and closet for the clothes she had not worn in months. In one hand she grasped her corsets. She had actually meant to put them on as she had done every morning before her illness, regarding corsetless kimonoed women with contempt. She must have dragged herself up to the chair by an almost super-human effort of will. So they found her. A born ruler, defying them all to the last. Charley came home for the funeral. She was not to rejoin the Krisiloff company until its arrival in Chicago for the two-weeks' engagement there. "If ever," said Henry Kemp privately to Lottie. "I don't think she's so crazy about this trouping any more. You ought to have heard her talking about the fresh eggs at breakfast this morning. I asked her what she'd been eating on the road and she said, 'Vintage oofs.'"